Energy 66 (2014) 98e106

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Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/energy

Determinants of greenhouse gas emissions from Swedish private

consumption: Time-series and cross-sectional analyses
Jonas Nässén*
Physical Resource Theory, Department of Energy and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-41296 Göteborg, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The relationships between consumption, energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Swedish
Received 5 September 2012 households are analysed using both cross-sectional multivariate regressions and a decomposition
Received in revised form analysis of GHG emissions between 1993 and 2006 into underlying trends. The analyses cover 104
26 April 2013
consumption categories and include both direct and indirect energy use. The results from the cross-
Accepted 6 January 2014
sectional analysis confirm previous results from other countries showing that total expenditures is by
Available online 31 January 2014
far the most important determinant of households’ energy use and GHG emissions with expenditure
elasticities of 0.77 and 0.85, respectively. Households living in single-family houses were also found to
Keywords:
Greenhouse gas emissions
cause higher total energy demand than households living in apartments. Age also showed a positive
Households relationship with both total energy use and emissions, while the level of education had a low signifi-
Determinants cance. The decomposition analysis showed that improvements in technical energy efficiency over time
Consumption patterns had twice as large impact on energy use as the change in composition of consumption. When the effect
Energy efficiency of energy efficiency improvements was deducted from the energy trend, the relationship between total
expenditures and energy use was found to be similar to the cross-sectional relationship.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction ability to transform consumption patterns and large technical

The future growth and composition of consumption play central
roles in the global challenge of climate change. Between 1990 and
2010, the global economy grew by 88 percent1 [1], driving an in-
crease in energy-related CO2 emissions by 45 percent [2]. A tran-
sition towards long-term climate targets will require a radical shift
in the latter trend. Emissions scenarios with at least a likely2 chance
of keeping global warming below 2
typically require reductions of
global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50e65 percent between
2010 and 2050 [3]. Several authors have argued that continued
economic growth is incompatible with ecological boundaries such
as the climate system [4,5]. Others have pointed out that techno-
logically feasible solutions to the climate issue do exist and that
while the costs would be huge in absolute terms they account for
only a small fraction of the expected growth of the economy [6,7].
In any case, continued economic growth at the rate of a doubling
per three decades will impose an enormous challenge to society’s
* Tel.: þ46 (0)31 7723268; fax: þ46 (0)31 7723150.
E-mail address: jonas.nassen@chalmers.se.
1
Change in the sum of PPP converted GDP at constant prices for the countries of
the world.
2
‘Likely’ defined as a probability of more than 66%.
systems.
Sweden constitutes one of the few exceptions in its long-term
trend of domestic carbon emissions, which peaked already in the
70s [8]. Most of these reductions have been achieved through
substitution of nuclear power and bioenergy for oil in the heat and
power sectors. Swedish consumption patterns on the other hand
are hardly more climate friendly than those of other West European
countries. Estimates of carbon emissions using consumption-based
accounting are also much higher than in the official statistics.
Adding emissions coupled to imports and deducting emissions
coupled to exports, SEPA [9] estimated that Swedish consumption
causes 25 percent more GHG emissions (CO2 equivalents) than the
domestic emissions. Such estimates are, however, strongly depen-
dent on method. Using a fully coupled trade model accounting also
for that, e.g., products imported from other European countries has
been produced with parts from Asian countries and so on, Davis
and Caldeira [10] found that Swedish consumption causes as much
as 75 percent more CO2 emissions than what is emitted within the
country boarders.
In this paper, two separate analyses on the final consumption by
Swedish households are performed and compared. The first part is
a cross-sectional analysis comparing consumption of around 100
products and services in 2000 Swedish households and its coupled
energy use and GHG emissions. Analysed determinants include

0360-5442/$ e see front matter Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2014.01.019
 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106
socio-economic parameters (total expenditures, household size,
education, age) and physical structures. Such determinants should
not be understood as the final drivers of behaviour, but as factors
that enable or prohibit people from engaging in various practices
that then result in environmental pressure. The paper also aims to
improve the understanding of how results from cross-sectional
analyses relate to development over time. Cross-sectional ana-
lyses are practical in terms of data availability but we are often
more interested in processes of change, e.g. what happens to con-
sumption patterns as incomes rise? In the second part of the study a
time-series analysis of GHG emissions from Swedish households
between 1993 and 2006 is performed. The trend is decomposed
into technical and structural components in order to enable com-
parison to the cross-sectional analysis.
More specifically, the paper addresses the following research
questions:
 What are the relationships between consumption, energy use
and GHG emissions for Swedish households?
 What other determinants explain the variance in energy use and
GHG?
 How do these cross-sectional estimates relate to development
over time?
The first two of these questions have been addressed in previous
research although not with this data set. Several cross-sectional
studies have shown that energy demand and GHG emissions
calculated from the consumption side are strongly dependent on
income levels although the relationship is typically somewhat
lower than 1:1. National multivariate regressions using a set of
socio-economic parameters in Lenzen et al. [11] showed that direct
and indirect energy use of households increase sharply with in-
come also in affluent countries, with expenditure elasticities of 0.64
in Japan, 0.78 in Australia, 0.86 in Denmark and India, and 1.00 in
Brazil. Moreover, for all of these countries except India, a larger
degree of urbanity was related to lower energy use. Shammin et al.
[12] estimated the expenditure elasticity of energy in the US to be
0.57. This study also found that parameters related to urban sprawl
play significant roles in determining the energy intensity of
households. Estimates of expenditure elasticities for GHG emis-
sions are in the same range as for energy; e.g. 0.84 in the
Netherlands [13] and 0.91 in Spain [14]. Hertwich and Peters [15]
found similar results also from a cross-national comparison with
an expenditure elasticity of GHG emissions of 0.57 (0.81 for CO2 and
0.32 for the other gases). This result is based on an analysis using a
multi-regional inputeoutput model with trade statistics for 57
sectors and 73 nations, but with expenditures as the only explan-
atory variable.
Time-series analyses on GHG emissions are fewer in the litera-
ture. There are a fair number of studies addressing the relative
importance of intensity and structure on the production side of the
economy (see e.g. Refs. [16e19]), while only a few approach this
from the consumption side. Druckman and Jackson [20] studied the
carbon footprint from UK households during a similar time period
as in this paper (1990e2004), and found that CO2 emissions
decreased during the first half of the nineties as a result of fuel
substitutions in the electricity sector, but that emissions have since
been on the rise, mainly due to increasing CO2 emissions
‘embedded’ in products and services. Munksgaard et al. [21] stud-
ied energy use related to Danish household consumption between
1966 and 1992 and showed that the effect of growth in total con-
sumption was mainly counteracted by decreasing energy in-
tensities in the production sectors, while the changing structure of
consumption played only a minor role. Weber [22], however, ana-
lysed a shorter time period for the US (1997e2002) and found that
99
the effect of structure was larger than that of changing sectoral
energy intensities. Weber also showed that the level of aggregation
is an important parameter in such decompositions, with fewer
consumption categories leading to underestimation of the impor-
tance of structure.
In the following section, methods and data used in the paper
will be presented. The main results are presented in Section 4 with
a sensitivity analysis of import assumptions in Section 5. Finally, a
discussion with concluding remarks is given in Section 6.
2. Method
Two methods are used to address the research question of this
paper; a multivariate regression model (Section 2.2) and a
decomposition analysis of trends (Section 2.3).
2.1. Indicators of climate impact from consumption
While the context of this paper is climate change mitigation,
primary energy is used as an indicator in conjunction with CO2
equivalents. This is due to the aforementioned decarbonisation of
some sectors of the Swedish economy. These changes depend
mainly on the dynamics of the supply side and have very little to do
with changing consumption patterns. Since bioenergy currently
dominates the Swedish heat sector, consumption of heat gives rise
to very low CO2 emissions, but from an energy systems perspective
consumption of heat also binds bioenergy resources that could
have been used to replace fossil fuels in other sectors. Likewise,
while the Swedish electricity mix is low in CO2 intensity, increas-
ingly interconnected power systems mean that reduced demand of
electricity in Sweden would enable reductions of emissions in the
European system as a whole. Straining these arguments, the most
climate friendly private consumption pattern may rather be that
which requires the least energy. However a main drawback of
studying only primary energy is that it does not capture the link
between consumption and non-energy GHGs like CH4 and N2O
from food production. Hence both indicators are used throughout
the paper.
2.2. Multivariate linear regression analysis
The cross-sectional part of the study is based on multivariate
linear regression (OLS) modelling of energy use and GHG emissions
from Swedish households according to Eq. (1).
ln E ¼ C þ a ln Y þ b ln H þ h1 D1 þ h2 D2 þ / þ hn Dn (1)
where E is energy use (direct and indirect), Y is total annual con-
sumption and H is household size and D1 to Dn is a set of dummy
variables. The same model is also used replacing energy use with
GHG emissions as the dependent variable. All variables are
described in Table 1. The regression coefficient a is the elasticity of
energy use with respect to total consumption. If Y increases by 1
percent, E increases by a percent. The dummy variables can be
interpreted so that when a dummy D is 1, then the exponential
function of its regression coefficient (eh) is a multiplier for E in
relation to the reference case (when D is 0).
The data used to estimate the parameters in Table 1 are
described in Section 2.3.
2.3. Decomposition analysis
One of the questions raised in this paper is how estimates based
on differences between households (cross-sectional analysis) relate
to development over time. Since the development of GHG
100 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106

Table 1 affects the absolute value of the terms DUi but not their relative
Description of dependent and independent variables used in the regression models. importance in the decomposition, which is the focus of this paper.
Dependent variables Type Description In this study, five factors Bt,i (Eq. (2)) have been identified. The
Energy use log Total annual primary energy usea
specific expression of Ut is given in Eq. (5).
per household
Including direct and indirect energy use Ut Et St Ct
Ut h $ $ $ $Pt (5)
of products and services Et St Ct Pt
GHG emissions log Total annual CO2 equivalent emissions
(CO2, CH4, N2O) per household where E is primary energy, S energy service demand (defined as
Including emissions from energy use,
agriculture and industrial processes,
energy use with constant technical energy efficiency), C total con-
but not from deforestation sumption in fixed prices, and P population. Each of these variables,
except P is a sum over 104 categories of products and services j
Independent Type Description
variables (listed in the Appendix):

Total consumption log Log of total annual expenditures

X
104 X
104 X
104 X
104
per household Ut ¼ uj;t ; Et ¼ ej;t ; St ¼ sj;t ; Ct ¼ cj;t (6)
Household size log Log of household size in consumption
j¼1 j¼1 j¼1 j¼1
unitsb
Age dummy Average age of household’s adults
The parameter energy service demand St is introduced to
<30
30e45
distinguish between the technical component (energy efficiency Et/
46e60 (reference category) St) and the structural component (St/Ct). For indirect energy use, i.e.
>60 energy use in the production of purchased products and services,
Education dummy Average years in school of household’s energy service demand is calculated as energy use with the energy
adults
intensities kept at the 1993 level throughout the period:
low Quartile with shortest education
average (reference category)
ej;1993
high Quartile with longest education sj;t ¼ $c (7)
Dwelling type dummy cj;1993 j;t
Single-family Living in single-family (detached or row)
house house For direct energy use (transport fuels and residential energy),
Apartment (reference category) energy efficiency improvements also occur in the end-use, e.g.
Urbanity dummy Living in rural or urban area more fuel-efficient vehicles or buildings with more insulation. For
rural Rural area
small town Small/medium size town (reference
these categories data on technical energy efficiency have been
category) introduced to estimate sj,t. For transport fuels, this has been based
urban Larger city: Stockholm, Gothenburg, on the indicator energy per person-km [25] and for residential
Malmö energy use delivered energy per residential floor area [26].
a
Calculations of primary energy described in Section 3.2.
b
Consumption unit (c.u.) is a measure constructed to enable comparison of
3. Data and assumptions
households of different size and composition. Because of collective goods, i.e. goods
that several individuals can use without affecting the others usage, and economies
of scale (e.g. larger and cheaper food packages), a large household can achieve a The cross-sectional and time-series analyses described in the
higher material welfare than a small household for the same income per capita [23]. previous section require data sets on the households’ expenditures,
In this paper Statistics Sweden’s definition is used where a single adult is counted as energy use and GHG emissions. Section 3.1 presents the data
1 c.u., two cohabiting adults 1.51 c.u., each additional adult 0.60, the first child 0.52
c.u. and each additional child 0.42 c.u.
sources for expenditures, i.e. how the private consumption is
allocated to different types of products and services. Section 3.2
emissions over time depend not only on changing consumption presents data sources and main data assumptions on the energy
patterns, but also on technological change, we need to decompose use and GHG emissions that are caused by the production, trans-
the change in GHG emissions into underlying trends. port and retail of different products and services.
In this decomposition analysis GHG emissions Ut are expressed
as a product of a set of time dependent factors Bt,i where index t 3.1. Expenditure data
represents the year and index i represents the factor (Eq. (2))
Y The expenditure data used in the cross-sectional regressions
Ut h Bt;i (2) (Section 2.1) come from the Swedish Household Budget Survey for
i
2006 [27]. This data set contains expenditure data from around
An additive decomposition method is applied in order to isolate 2000 Swedish households on around 800 different goods and ser-
the contribution of each factor to the total change in emissions vices. In this study however, an aggregation level of 104 goods and
between two years DUi. This approximation may generate a resid- services is used since these can be matched with available energy
ual term DUresidual (Eq. (3)). and GHG intensities (Section 3.2). These categories are listed in the
X Appendix.
DU ¼ DUi þ DUresidual (3) Time-series of expenditures in current and fixed prices for the
i same 104 categories are taken from the Mirdata database [28].
Using the Parametric Divisia Method [24] the terms DUi can be
expressed as shown in Eq. (4). 3.2. Energy and GHG emissions data
Bt;i
DUi ¼ ðU0 þ aðUt  U0 ÞÞ ln (4) Data on energy use and GHG emissions for each of the 104
B0;i
studied categories of products and services are taken from the
The parameter a is a constant between 0 and 1 where the value Mirdata database which is derived from inputeoutput analyses for
of 0.5 chosen here gives equal weight to both years. The choice of a each year between 1993 and 2006 [28]. In this methodology
 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106
primary energy use and CO2 equivalents (global warming potential,
GWP over 100 years for carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide)
per unit of final consumption are calculated using monetary
transactions between sectors together with multipliers of direct
energy use and emissions in each sector. Thus the method re-
allocates energy use and emissions from production sectors
where they occur to the final consumption of goods and services,
including indirect contributions from an unlimited number of up-
stream production activities.
The Mirdata database contains only primary inputs of fossil fuels
and bioenergy and final demand of electricity and district heating
[28]. Inputs of nuclear, hydro and wind power have been added in
accordance to their respective shares of electricity generation in
Sweden. Primary energy for electricity has been calculated with
efficiencies of 0.37 for nuclear and thermal power. For hydro and
wind, primary energy is calculated as produced electricity plus
internal energy use. This gives a total weighted average conversion
efficiency of 0.52 from primary energy to electricity for the studied
period.
In the Mirdata energy use and GHG emissions for imported
goods and services are calculated as if they had been produced
domestically. Since the Swedish energy system, particularly the
electricity sector, is relatively low in CO2 emissions, this results in
an underestimation of the emissions for imported goods [29]. These
errors may be significant in absolute terms, but less important for
comparisons between households or for relative changes over time.
The sensitivity of the results with respect to this assumption is
tested in Section 5.
4. Results
Results from the cross-sectional (CS) regressions and time-
series (TS) decomposition are presented in Sections 4.1 and 4.2,
respectively, and compared in Section 4.3.
4.1. Cross-sectional analysis
This part of the study is primarily based on a multivariate
regression (OLS) analysis performed according to the model
described in Section 2.2. But, to get a first visual description of the
data, a scatter plot of energy use as a function of consumption (total
annual expenditures) is presented in Fig. 1. The data on both axes
Fig. 1. Scatter plot of energy use per consumption unit as a function of total expen-
ditures per consumption unit. Each dot represents a Swedish household. The data are
based on consumption data from the Swedish household budget survey from 2006
combined with energy intensities from an input output analysis (see further descrip-
tion of the data sets in Section 3).
101
are divided by the size of the households measured in consumption
units (c.u.), since otherwise the plot would to a large extent only
describe the difference between large and small households, e.g.
single income households in the lower left and double income
households in the upper right (see footnote b of Table 1 for a
description of the c.u. measure). The exponent of the fitted power
function 0.78 is a simple estimate of the elasticity of energy use
with respect to total expenditures. The corresponding elasticity for
GHG emissions is 0.83.
Although the simple representation of Fig. 1 gives a surprisingly
high coefficient of determination for only one explanatory variable
(an R2 of 0.55), there is still a significant variance within each level
of consumption. Households with annual expenditures of 20,000 V
per c.u. may for example cause energy demand from around 100 to
over 300 GJ per c.u. and year.
Fig. 2 shows frequency distributions for households’ with
different energy and GHG intensities. The distribution for energy
intensity (left diagram) is rather wide and dividing the set into
households living in single-family (detached or row) houses and
households living in apartment buildings also shows a clear divi-
sion with much lower energy intensities for the apartments. This
effect is visible also for GHG intensities (right diagram) but not as
strong as for energy intensity. This is due to that the main difference
between households in apartments and detached buildings is the
demand for electricity and heat. Particularly households living in
single-family houses with electric heating cause a very high de-
mand of primary energy, but since the Swedish electricity mix is so
low in carbon emissions this does not add much to the GHG in-
tensity. The main reason for the remaining difference in GHG in-
tensity is that households in detached buildings also spend a larger
share on transport fuels.
Figs. 1 and 2 show that income/total expenditures and type of
dwelling are two important variables, but to test a larger set of
variables we need a formal multivariate analysis. Table 2 shows the
results of a regression analysis based on Eq. (1) with variables
described in Table 1.
As shown in Table 2, increasing total consumption by 1 percent
corresponds to increases in energy use by 0.77 percent and GHG
emissions by 0.85 percent. This is very similar to the elasticities
found in the univariate regression (Fig. 1). As was also shown in
Fig. 2, the type of housing is also a very important determinant. In
addition to this difference, rural households also seem to require
around 8% more energy than urban households, but this effect is
more ambiguous and statistically not significant for GHG emission.
The effects of all age groups are statistically significant, with higher
energy and GHG intensities for older age groups. Education has a
large influence on some specific categories of consumptions but for
aggregated energy use and GHG emissions the coefficients are
small and not statistically significant.
The independent variables of the regressions have been tested
for multicollinearity by means of Variance Inflation Factors (VIF).
The VIFs are low for all variables with the highest value 2.17 for
household size.
4.2. Time-series analysis
Fig. 3 shows the development of household consumption,
divided in seven major categories from 1993 to 2006. The division
of products and services into these categories is based on the
Eurostat/OECD classification of final expenditure into durable
goods, semi-durable goods, non-durable goods and services [30].
However, these categories have been modified to make more sense
from an energy perspective. Travel services which have high energy
intensities have been kept as a separate category from other ser-
vices. For the same reason direct energy use has been separated
102 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106

Fig. 2. Histograms of primary energy per V expenditures (left diagrams) and GHG emissions per V expenditures (right diagrams). The diagrams compare the frequency distri-
butions for households living in single-family (detached or row) houses and households living in apartment buildings.

from other non-durable goods. Durable and semi-durable goods
have been lumped into one category since these products have
similar energy intensities (jointly termed durable goods in Fig. 3).
The food category also includes restaurant services. A complete list
of these categories is provided in the Appendix.
The total consumption in fixed prices increased by 39 percent
during the period. Consumption of durable goods such as vehicles,
appliances and furniture doubled during the period and accounted
for almost half of the total increase (this category also includes
semi-durables, e.g. clothes and sport equipment). Services
(excluding travel services) also increased significantly and
accounted for around a quarter of the total increase. Expenditures
on food and housing increased slightly while direct energy, non-
durable goods (consumables) and travel services remain close to
constant.
Fig. 4 shows the aggregated effect of these consumption changes
on GHG emissions between 1993 and 2006 but decomposed into a
series of factors according to the method described in Section 2.3.
Each bar can be understood as the isolated contribution of that
factor to the total change in emissions. Dark red (colour in the web
version) bars indicate an isolated effect towards increasing emis-
sions while light green (colour in the web version) bars indicate an
isolated effect towards decreasing emissions. Increasing total
consumption is found to be the main driver towards increasing
emissions while improvements in energy efficiency in production
and end-use is the most important mitigating factor.
In this paper, however, we are particularly interested in the
structural component of energy intensity, i.e. the effect of the
change in composition of consumption illustrated by Fig. 3. The
contribution of structural change to the total reduction in energy
demand is less than half of the contribution from energy efficiency.
The decomposition shows that an increase in consumption per
capita by 1% would have caused an increase in energy service de-
mand (energy demand if energy efficiency would have been kept
constant) by 0.72%. Potentially, part of the development of con-
sumption patterns over time may also be driven by changes in
relative prices. To test this a series of very simple regression ana-
lyses was carried out with expenditures on each of the 104 con-
sumption categories as dependent variables and total expenditures
and price index as the dependent variables. Adding price in this
way changed the estimate of expenditure elasticity for energy
service demand from 0.72 to 0.80, still very close to the finding of
the CS-analysis.
The reduction in aggregated energy intensity due to structural
change of the consumption is dominated by the same consumption
categories that increase the most, i.e. durable goods and services

Table 2
Results from the multivariate OLS regressions with energy use and CO2 equivalent emissions as the dependent variables. Regression coefficients presented together with
significance levels and heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors (rob. s.e.). The right column gives examples of consumption categories that are strongly and statistically
significantly affected by each of the independent variables. See Table 1 for a description of the included variables.

Energy use (log) CO2 eq. (log) Ex. of consumption categories that increase
with each parameter
Coeff. Rob. s.e. Coeff. Rob. s.e.

Total consumption (log) 0.769*** 0.018 0.852*** 0.015 Cars, electronics, clothes, package holidays
Household size (log) 0.151*** 0.029 0.148*** 0.021 Food, daycare services
Age under 301 0.140*** 0.021 -0.108*** 0.016 Rail travel, telephones, books
Age 30e451 -0.069*** 0.015 -0.073*** 0.011 Daycare services, games, hobbies
Age over 601 0.074*** 0.019 0.042** 0.015 Summer houses, pharmaceuticals
High education2 -0.016 0.013 0.023* 0.011 Hotels, rail travel, books
Low education2 0.009 0.017 0.019 0.013 Tobacco, papers & magazines
Single-family house3 0.418*** 0.013 0.092*** 0.011 Heating fuels, electricity
Rural4 0.057*** 0.014 -0.001 0.010 Vehicle parts, domestic air travel
Urban4 -0.021 0.014 0.027* 0.011 Public travel, package holidays, restaurants
Constant 0.939*** 0.094 2.776*** 0.077

N 1969 1969
Adj. R2 0.839 0.841

Reference categories: 1age 46e60; 2average education; 3apartement; 4small/medium size town.
Significance levels: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001 (two-tailed test).
 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106 103

Table 3
Comparison of expenditure elasticities between the CS and TS analyses for total
demand and for seven consumption categories (see Appendix for a list of what these
include). To make the results comparable, the TS results are calculated for energy
service demand, i.e. deducting the effect of improved technical energy efficiency
from the energy trend.

Expenditure elasticities

Cross-sectional: Time-series: energy

energy service

Total 0.77*** 0.72***

Direct energy use 0.38*** 0.39***
Housing (excl. direct energy use) 0.40*** 0.35***
Food 0.44*** 0.83***
Travel services 0.84*** 0.58***
Other services 0.62*** 1.41***
Durable goods 1.33*** 2.52***
Fig. 3. The development of Swedish household consumption in fixed prices between Non-durable goods 0.70*** 0.87***
1993 and 2006.
Significance levels: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001 (two-tailed test).

(Fig. 3). Although the energy intensities of durable goods are

around twice as high as for services, they are still below the very fast over time. This development is likely an effect of the rapid
aggregated energy intensity of all consumption. Hence more du- technological change in these categories which cannot be mirrored
rable goods also decrease the aggregated energy intensity. in the TS-analysis.

4.3. Comparison of results from cross-sectional and time-series 5. Sensitivity analysis: imported goods
analyses
The energy and GHG intensities used in the CS and TS analyses
Comparing the results from Sections 4.1 and 4.2 we see that of this paper are taken from the Mirdata database (Section 3.2) in
when the effect of improved energy efficiency is deducted from the which imported goods are assumed to be produced with the same
time trend in energy use, these analyses provide rather similar technology as domestic production. Since the Swedish energy
results at the aggregated level. The expenditure elasticities were system, particularly the electricity sector is comparatively low in
estimated to be 0.72 for energy use in the CS-analysis and 0.77 for CO2 emissions this causes an underestimation of the emissions for
energy service demand in the TS-analysis. In Table 3 this compar- imported goods. If the aim of this paper would have been to
ison is also done for the seven main categories of consumption calculate the total emissions related to Swedish consumption this
shown in Fig. 3. A list of the composition of these categories is given assumption would have caused significant errors. However, for
in the Appendix. relative comparisons of emissions between households or for the
From Table 3 we see that the results are rather similar for the relative development over time these errors can be expected to be
categories direct energy use, housing and non-durable goods. much smaller. In this section we use results from previous multi-
However, the demand for services and durable goods increased at regional inputeoutput analyses to quantify the effect of this
significantly higher rates over time (TS) than from households with assumption on the main results of the paper.
low to high levels of consumption (CS). The durable goods category Results from studies that take into account differences in pro-
has the highest expenditure elasticity in both analyses, but this duction technology between different countries vary considerably
effect is even more pronounced in the TS-analysis. Looking at this due to differences in assumptions and models. A report from SEPA
category more in detail, we can see that the consumption of goods [9] found that the Swedish GHG emissions are 25% higher if
related to for example telecommunication and computers grow consumption-based accounting is used instead of traditional
production-based accounting. This corresponds to a GHG intensity
1.4 of imports which is 1.5 times as high as the domestic production.
The results from Peters and Hertwich [31] imply a higher ratio of 1.9
studying only CO2 emissions. Using figures from Davis and Caldeira
GHG em issions (index 1993 = 1)

[10] gives an even higher ratio of 2.9 also only accounting for CO2
1.2
emissions. A difference between these studies is that while Peters
and Hertwich only account for bilateral trade, the model used by
Davis and Caldeira also includes trade in several steps, e.g. emis-
U1993 sions from production in China that is exported to intermediate
1.0
U1993
U2006 U2006
production in Germany and then further exported for final con-
sumption in Sweden are accounted for as Swedish emissions.
A first question is whether these differences are due to differ-
0.8 ences in the structure of imports in relation to domestic production
Population Consumption Structure of Energy Emissions per Total change of
per cap consumption efficiency energy use emissions or if they are due to differences in the CO2 intensity of each con-
sumption category.3 The importance of the structural component
Fig. 4. Decomposition of the change in GHG emissions from Swedish household
can be tested by comparing the aggregated CO2 intensities of
consumption between 1993 and 2006 into underlying factors. The decomposition is
performed according to the additive Parametric Divisia Method (Section 2.3). Each bar
can be understood as the isolated influence of that factor, given that all other factor
3
would have been held constant. Dark red bars indicate an isolated effect towards Here we interpret this primarily as technological differences such as fuel
increasing emissions while light green bars indicate an isolated effect towards choices and energy efficiency. However it should be noted that CO2 intensities of
decreasing emissions. [For interpretation of colour referred in this figure legend, the imported goods from countries with lower costs of labour are also higher since this
reader is referred to web version of the article.] causes fuel to make up a larger share of the total cost.
104 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106
domestic production and imports in the Mirdata database [28],
where CO2 intensities are assumed to be identical for each of the
104 consumption categories. Excluding the emissions from the
households’ direct energy use we find that the aggregated CO2 in-
tensity is actually 4% higher for domestic production than for im-
ports. Hence the structural component is very small in relation to
the total difference found by SEPA [9], Peters and Hertwich [31] and
Davis and Caldeira [10] and it also goes in the other direction. Based
on this we continue to test the sensitivity of the results with respect
to import assumptions by adjusting the CO2 intensities themselves
disregarding the structural difference of imports and domestic
production.
Re-running the regression with adjusted emissions intensities
for imported goods results in an increase in the expenditure elas-
ticity of GHG emissions from 0.85 (main assumptions, Table 2) to
0.89 (factor 1.5 [9]). 0.92 (factor 1.9 [31]) or 0.97 (factor 2.9 [10]).
Hence higher emissions intensities of imports give an even stronger
coupling between consumption and emissions. This can be
explained by the larger share of imported products in the expen-
ditures by high-income households. The other regression co-
efficients remain almost unaffected.
Similarly, since the share of imported goods also increases over
time; higher GHG intensities of imports also result in a weaker
decoupling between emissions and consumption in the time-series
analysis. Using the main assumptions, GHG emissions was found to
decrease slightly by 4% between 1993 and 2006 (Fig. 4). With
inflated emissions intensities for imports, the total GHG emissions
are instead found to increase during the same period, by 2% (factor
1.5 [9]), 6% (factor 1.9 [31]) or 15% (factor 2.9 [10]). However, the
difference between imported and domestically produced goods is
much smaller in terms of energy use than for CO2 emissions. While
the results by Davis and Caldeira [10] show that Swedish imported
goods have CO2 intensities that are 2.9 times as high as the do-
mestic production, the difference is only 18% for energy use. Hence
it can be concluded that the technological difference is primarily
found in the factor to the right of Fig. 4 (emissions per energy use)
while the results for energy efficiency are more robust.
6. Discussion and conclusions
In this final section, the results of the analysis (Sections 4 and 5)
are discussed in relation to the three questions raised in the
introduction.
6.1. What are the relationships between consumption, energy use
and GHG emissions for Swedish households?
In the cross-sectional analysis presented in Section 4.1, the
expenditure elasticities were estimated to be 0.77 for primary en-
ergy use and 0.85 for GHG emissions. This means that there is a very
strong link between total expenditures and emissions. On average,
a household with twice as high expenditures as another household
also causes 80% more GHG emissions. These findings fall within the
range of previous studies on households in other countries which
have found expenditure elasticities from 0.57 in the US to 1.00 in
Brazil [11e14].
These results are based on a method where imported goods are
assumed to be produced with the same technology (GHG intensity)
as domestic production. Accounting for differences in the GHG in-
tensity of imports the expenditure elasticity of GHG emissions in-
crease further towards unity, to between 0.89 and 0.97 depending
on the assumptions used (see Section 5).
However another potential error source may also cause over-
estimations of these elasticities. When high-income households
spend more money on for example clothes this may not give a
proportional increase in energy use and emissions, since part of the
increase in consumption may be regarded as improved quality
rather than quantity. Since quality is more coupled to input of la-
bour than to input of materials, it is likely that it also has a weaker
relationship to energy use and emissions than increased quantity.
Girod and de Haan [32] addressed this issue by constructing a
model of households’ GHG emissions which is based on functional
units (e.g. kg of food and clothes) instead of the monetary units (e.g.
V of food and clothes). Using Swiss consumption data coupled to an
LCA database, this approach reduced the elasticity of GHG emis-
sions with expenditure from 0.94 to 0.53. So which of these esti-
mates is more correct? Vringer and Blok [33] showed that at least
for clothes and shoes the actual dependence of energy on price lays
in-between estimates based on monetary and functional units.
Hence, while monetary units may result in overestimates of the
expenditure elasticity of energy and GHG emissions, functional
units may result in underestimates. This methodological issue
warrants more research.
We conclude that the relationship between consumption, en-
ergy use and emissions is very strong and that the variable total
expenditures explain more of the variation between households
than any other variable.
6.2. What other determinants explain the variance in energy use
and GHG?
Total expenditures aside, this study indicates that spatial de-
terminants such as where a household decides to live play an
important role for the overall energy use and emissions. Particu-
larly the lifestyles of households living in single-family houses
where found to cause much higher total energy demand than
households living in apartments. The detail in which these factors
have been analysed, however, is highly constrained by the avail-
ability of data. The only parameters tested being dummy variables
representing single-family house/apartment and rural/small to
medium town/large city. Hence potentially important aspects such
as commuting distances and differences due to for example city
density have not been analyzed and require other data sets.
Everything else equal, age also showed a surprisingly strong
positive relationship with both total energy use and GHG emis-
sions. Main factors behind this are increasing shares of expendi-
tures on residential energy with age and a relatively low share of
expenditures on transport fuels in the youngest age group. The
level of education on the other hand did have a significant impact
on the relative expenditure shares, but not on the aggregated en-
ergy use and GHG emissions.
While motivational determinants of consumption were not part
of the analysis, the results can at least be discussed and related to
theoretical concepts. One such point is the importance of status and
identity in shaping consumption patterns (conspicuous consump-
tion [34]; positional consumption [35]) in relation to emissions that
relate to habitual behaviours (ordinary consumption [36]). The
results from this study indicate that even if the bulk of emissions is
related to habits, for example diet, space and water heating, and
energy for daily travel such as commuting, consumption for status
or identity may be more important on the margin. An example of
this is expenditures on cars which have has been shown to be a
highly positional good [37] and which account for over 20% of the
marginal expenditures (see also Holmberg and Nässén [38]).
Hence, while positional consumption account for a small share of
emissions it may constitute an important driver towards increasing
total consumption which is also found to be the main factor to-
wards increasing emissions in the decomposition (Fig. 4).
Further surveys ought to integrate data collection on
consumption-related GHG emissions with both motivational
 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106 105

determinants (attitudes, norms etc.) and structural determinants
(urban form, availability of public travel etc) to enable interdisci-
plinary research to further the understanding of the variance of
GHG emissions from households.
6.3. How do these cross-sectional estimates relate to development
over time?
The energy intensity of Swedish household consumption
decreased significantly by around 2.3 percent per year during the
studied period. About a third of this or 0.7 percent per year can be
attributed to the structural change of the composition of con-
sumption. In this paper we have used the term energy service de-
mand to describe an imaginary development of energy demand if
technical energy efficiency would have remained constant, i.e.
changes in energy service demand occur only as a result of changes
in the total amount and composition of consumption. In Section 4.2
the expenditure elasticity of energy service demand was calculated
to be 0.72e0.80. This result is very similar to the expenditure elas-
ticity of energy use of 0.77 found in the cross-sectional analysis
(Section 4.1), which is also only affected by differences in the
composition of consumption at different levels of total expenditures.
A further comparison between these analyses showed that the
estimates were similar also for the sub-categories direct energy use,
housing and non-durable goods (Section 4.3). The resemblance in
the category of direct energy use, which has the highest energy
intensity, is also the main reason behind the similarity at the
aggregated level. However, for specific types of goods the resem-
blance is not as strong. For example, the expenditure elasticity for
durable goods was found to be significantly higher in the time-
series than in the cross-sectional estimate. Particularly sub-
categories related to telecommunication and computers grew
much faster over time. Such rapid increases are likely to be related
to technological change in these sectors which also created entirely
new products.
The findings of this paper provide some support for the use of
cross-sectional estimates in scenarios of aggregated energy de-
mand, but such scenarios would also need to be supplemented by
separate scenarios of technical energy efficiency in both production
sectors and end-use. Moreover, for long-term scenarios it is
important also to recognize that consumption patterns may also be
affected by the emergence of new technologies and products. Such
shifts are inherently difficult or impossible to handle with empirical
methods.
Acknowledgements
Funding from E.On and the Swedish Energy Agency (AES pro-
gramme) is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks to Daniel Johansson,
Jörgen Larsson and John Holmberg for valuable comments on the
manuscript.
Appendix. Classification of consumption categories
The table provides the classification of final expenditures in 104
categories used in the paper. The seven groups are those used in
Fig. 3. See Eurostat-OECD [30] for further description of this clas-
sification. Energy and GHG emissions data for these categories are
available from: http://www.mirdata.scb.se/.

Table A1
104 Consumption categories divided into seven groups together with COICOP code.

Code Consumption category Code Consumption category

Direct energy use Non-durable goods

0451 Electricity 0561 Non-durable household goods
0452 Gas 0611 Pharmaceutical products
0453 Liquid fuels 0612 Other medical products
0454 Solid fuels 0933 Gardens, plants and flowers
0455 District heating 0934 Pets and related products
0722 Fuels for personal transport 0952 Newspapers, periodicals
Food 0953 Miscellaneous printed matter
0111 Bread, cereals 0954 Drawing materials
0112 Meat 1213 Other appliances for personal care
0113 Fish, seafood Housing (excl. direct energy)
0114 Milk, cheese, eggs 0411 Rentals paid by tenant
0115 Oils, fats 0412 Rentals paid in co-operative building
0116 Fruit 0421 Owned house excl. maintenance and energy
0117 Vegetables 0422 Summer house
0118 Sugar, jam etc 043 Maintenance and repair of dwelling
0119 Salt, spices etc Travel services
0121 Coffee, tea, cocoa 07245 Vehicle rental and taxable benefits
0122 Mineral water, soft drinks, juices 0731 Passenger transport by railway
0211 Spirits 0732 Passenger transport by road
0212 Wine 0733 Passenger transport by air
0213101 Light beer 0734 Passenger transport by sea and waterways
0213102 Beer 0735 Combined passenger transport
022 Tobacco 0736 Other transport services
111 Restaurants, cafés 096 Package holidays
Durable goods (including semi-durable goods) Other services
0311 Clothing materials 0314 Cleaning, repair and hire of clothing
0312 Garments 0322 Repair of footwear
0313 Clothing accessories 0513 Repair of furniture
0321 Footwear 0533 Repair of household appliances
0511 Furniture and furnishings 0562 Household services
0512 Carpets and other floor coverings 0621 Medical services
052 Household textiles 0622 Dental services
0531 Major household appliances 0623 Paramedical services
0532 Small electric household appliances 063 Hospital services
(continued on next page)
106 J. Nässén / Energy 66 (2014) 98e106

Table A1 (continued )

Code Consumption category Code Consumption category

054 Glassware, tableware and household utensils 0723 Maintenance and repair of vehicles
0551 Major tools and equipment 07241-4 Parking, driving lessons, vehicle tests etc
0552 Small tools and accessories 0811 Postal services
0613 Therapeutic equipment 0813 Telephone and telefax services
0711 Cars 0915 Repair of audio-visual, photogr., info. equipment
0712 Motor cycles 0923 Repair of major durables for recreation
0713 Bicycles 0935 Veterinary services
0721 Spare parts for vehicles 0941 Recreational and sporting services
0812 Telephone and telefax equipment 0942 Cultural services
0911 TV sets, radios, gramophones etc 0943 Games of chance
0912 Photographic and cinematographic equipment 10 Education
0913 Information processing equipment 112 Accommodation services
0914 Recording media 1211 Hairdressing, personal grooming
0921 Major durables for outdoor recreation 12401 Daycare, kindergarten
0922 Music instruments, durables for indoor recreation 12402 Old age care
0931 Games, toys and hobbies 12403 Personal assistant
0932 Equipment for sport, and outdoor recreation 12404 General care
0951 Books 125 Insurance
1212 Electric appliances for personal care 126 Financial services
1231 Jewellery, watches 127 Other services
1232 Other personal effects

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